‘Something not good?’

‘Someone’s not good. The woman we’re picking up … spoke with her this morning. She’s in a bad place. So if you hear things in your car when she is with us …’

‘Hear what? I’ll hear nothing.’

‘You’ll hear everything.’

‘But like a priest I will discuss nothing.’

I asked Elise if she wanted to listen to some music on the way to the pickup. ‘Yes please, Brendan,’ she said so I hit the radio. Moody strings filled the car.

‘Gray music for a gray day,’ she said. ‘Not that I mind the gray. When I lived in Paris the winter there was gray day after gray day. It went on for weeks, months. When I followed my husband out here to the land of endless blue in the sky, I was initially happy. After around a few months of nothing but sunshine I actually found myself thinking how nice it would be to see a little gloom from time to time.’

‘I’ve never known anything but here.’

‘Never lived anywhere else?’

I told her about my months way up an electricity pole in Sequoia. How it was the first time I experienced snow on a daily basis. And how free I felt.

‘You being up among the tall trees was your version of Paris?’

‘I wasn’t getting a fancy degree like you were,’ I said.

‘But you were looking out on something amazing every day. And you were far away from all the ties that bind.’

‘The terrible thing was – I came back when ordered.’

‘And I gave in to Wilbur’s marriage proposal …’

‘But he wasn’t ordering you.’

‘True. But still …’

Silence. Then:

‘Wilbur came to visit me for three weeks in Paris. We had this very passionate time. There was a night when, having drunk too much wine – something that is very easy to do in Paris – I forgot to put my diaphragm in. Around a month after he left … I was late with my period. Three weeks later I went to a local clinic in the area I was living in. They extracted blood. A few days after that I came back and got the result: I was going to have a baby. I was just twenty-six. The last thing I wanted was a child. I did the difficult thing. I placed a long-distance call to California. I told Wilbur what had happened and that it was too early for me to become a mother. He told me he would respect my choice, my wishes. He never once tried to talk me out of it. He offered to fly back to be with me during the “procedure”. He had just been given his first big trial in his law firm. One of the initial busing cases. This was 1975 when stuff like this was still going on … as it does in different guises today. I insisted he stay.’

‘You had the abortion alone?’

She nodded.